Indeed, but Alfred Nobel wasn't one of them. He was pessimistic, lonely, and a bit of a nerd, but dumb he wasn't. He actually made his fortune on explosives. The Nobel family's nitroglycerin factory blew up in 1864, killing Alfred's younger brother Emil and several other people. But Alfred maintained his steady belief that if he could just find a safe way to manufacture his product he could make millions, even as occassional accidents killed his factory workers time and time again throughout the following decade. Eventually he invented dynamite, and that secured a fortune for himself and his family.
Of course, he wasn't entirely lonely. It was his "friendship" with the Austrian freifrau Bertha von Suttner that inspired him to establish the prize for peace.
Anyway, you're both wrong. The Nobel Peace prize is as political as the other four original nobel prizes, and possibly as political as the one invented later by swiss interlopers. You get nominated for a Nobel Prize, any of them, if you manage to say all the right things and impress all the right people. Gore, as offensive as he is to me on a deep and profound personal level, has said many of the right things with regard to humanity, I must admit. Fortunately for him I'm not on that committee, as he's offended me more often than he's said the right things.
